'Winter Garden' Porthmadog, NHS Trust
Collaboration with Alyosha Moeran
Slate Form
A collaborative project between sculptors Guy Stevens & Alyosha Moeran to design and make artwork for the new hospitals internal garden.
This Garden was all about welsh Slate. We used as many varieties of slate as was available to us, to create five large relief carvings and twelve sculptures of varying colour and texture. In addition we undertook stone carveing workshops with local schools. Some of the students designs from these lession where turned into sandblasted slate planel work for display within other parts of the hospital.
The design inspiration was drawn from the original brief, local materials, plants and the welsh slate mining heritage. The spiralling forms where derived from the slate fans the miners used to create as show piece decoration in their spare time. We took the general technique they used and scaled them up to just under two meters high to fit within the large internal Garden. The relief carvings where designs base around the ferns that could be found in the hills behind the hospital grounds.
The original design brief called for art works to be design to complement a planting scheme, however in practice the planting scheme was not realised for practical reason, so the artwork had to do all the work.